How much of a hit to changing urls?
-
Hi,
We have a few pages that from an SEO perspective have poor URLs. We are planning on changing them (and 301 redirecting) the old page to the new page. I heard in the past, this can temporarily negatively impact your SERP rank etc. Since the old URLs are bad, even if there is a temporary negative hit, changing them in the long run it is better, but curious if anyone has any experience on what to expect.
-
Spot-on answer from Brian.
So long as everything is done properly (such as correct URL mapping, 301s rather than 302s...) in a timely fashion, then you may even experience a zero drop in rankings and visitors.
With regards to inbound links to your current/old URLs; for any valuable links, try to get those changed so that they point directly to your new URLs, so that none of that link juice is lost through the redirects.
Regards, Simon
-
Hi,
There can be a brief negative time where Google is re-indexing the URLs and moving the value to your new pages - It usually seems to be two weeks or less before you get a complete recovery.
Depending on how poor the URLs in question are it is probably worth it to change them - If you're using, say, Wordpress query valuables like ?q=234 for URLs right now, you should absolutely change them. If they're just a little wrong and pretty close to what you want for your keyword strategy, it may not be worth it and you just want to align the page title and other factors better instead.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to deal with URLs when changing shopping cart software to ensure SEO
NSFW ALERT (LINK BELOW) We are changing the shopping section of our website. Currently the products sit on our own website and when a user goes to checkout they are taken to Mals (a shopping cart site). This means our URL’s look like this. NSFWhttps://www.aprilnites.com.au/mascara_vibe.htmlThe new software is Ecwid and we are using this with a site created in RapidWeaver so the URLs will not be clean and will have all ? And # parameters. I’m wondering if this will hurt the SEO of our whole site or just the product pages. I’m also unsure of how best to deal with the current URLs. Should I use a 301 redirect on all of them to take the user back to the home page of the shop. For us the shop is more of a catalogue. Our main website is the most important part but I want to make sure we are following best practice when making this change. Hope someone can help.Many thanks
Technical SEO | | AprilN0 -
URL Indexed But Not Submitted to Sitemap
Hi guys, In Google's webmaster tool it says that the URL has been indexed but not submitted to the sitemap. Is it necessary that the URL be submitted to the sitemap if it has already been indexed? Appreciate your help with this. Mark
Technical SEO | | marktheshark100 -
If a URL canonically points to another link, is that URL indexed?
Hi, I have two URL both talking about keyword phrase 'counting aggregated cells' The first URL has canonical link pointing to the second URL, but if one searches for 'counting aggregated cells' both URLs are shown in the results. The first URL is the pdf, and i need only second URL (the landing page) to be shown in the search results. The canonical links should tell Google which URL to index, i don't understand why both URLs are present in search results? Is 'noindex' for the first URL only solution? I am using Yoast SEO for my website. Thank you for the answers.
Technical SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Domain change recommendations
We recently migrated one of our websites to a new domain. Obviously we were expecting a decrease in traffic initially, but it has actually gone down by 70% week-over-week since we made the switch. We set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, changed all internal links to the new domain and changed all inbound links that we owned to the new domain. Our research suggested the best way to approach a domain change was by keeping it simple and not making too many changes at once. So my questions are: 1. Are these the kinds of results we should expect initially after a domain change? And if not, 2. What are the steps we should take from here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gouldtr0 -
URL Changes And Site Map Redirects
We are working on a site redesign which will change/shorten our url structure. The primary domain will remain the same however most of the other urls on the site are getting much simpler. My question is how should this be best handled when it comes to sitemaps because there are massive amounts of URLS that will be redirected to the new shorter URL how should we best handle our sitemaps? Should a new sitemap be submitted right at launch? and the old sitemap removed later. I know that Google does not like having redirects in sitemaps. Has anyone done this on a large scale, 60k URLs or more and have any advice?
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
How much to change to avoid duplicate content?
Working on a site for a dentist. They have a long list of services that they want us to flesh out with text. They provided a bullet list of services, we're trying to get 1 to 2 paragraphs of text for each. Obviously, we're not going to write this off the top of our heads. We're pulling text from other sources and trying to rework. The question is, how much rephrasing do we have to do to avoid a duplicate content penalty? Do we make sure there are changes per paragraph, sentence, or phrase? Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | ericmccarty0 -
Multiple URLs and Dup Content
Hi there, I know many people might ask this kind of question, but nevertheless .... 🙂 In our CMS, one single URL (http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/) has been produced nearly 9000 times with strings like this: http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12204/ and this http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12205/ and so on and so on... Today, I wrote our IT-department to either a) delete the pages with the "strange" URLs or b) redirect them per 301 onto the "original" page. Do you think this was the best solution? What about implementing the rel=canonical on these pages? Right now, there is only the "original" page in the Google index, but who knows? And I don't want users on our site to see these URLs, so I thought deleting them (they exist only a few days!) would be the best answer... Do you agree or have other ideas if something like this happens next time? Thanx in advance...
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Negative url name?
I have a new client who has the letters "BB" at the start of his url name, bbzautorepair.com. He was told by someone at Google Adwords that the letters "BB" in his url name could hurt him with Google rankings. Reason being that Google red flags anything or website to do with firearms, guns and ammunition. He was told that the letters "BB" could be mistaken or red flagged for "BB Gun". Seems a bit far fetched. Has anyone every heard of such a thing? Thanks
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Gary Downey0